


fragile things

by kenopsia (indie)



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Everybody Lives, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-18
Updated: 2015-10-07
Packaged: 2018-04-04 23:06:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4156374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indie/pseuds/kenopsia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once, during a routine fertility exam, a wife tried to claw out the Organic Mechanic's eye and two things happened as a result. Immortal Joe let the Mechanic take her arm off, for one, and then he started sending His son Rictus to make sure the wives were properly terrified into obedience. He'd hardly predicted that Rictus - his simpleminded, well-muscled son - would become the girls' greatest source of comfort.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Cheedo

Angharad is gone and Cheedo cannot stop crying.

She’s no longer a wife, none of them are, and they’ve ended up right back where they started, but without the security of Immortan Joe’s vault, being the most cherished possessions of one of the most powerful men in the waste. Two of them, actually, but she can’t think about it, not now and maybe not ever, if she ever wants to stop crying.

She’s bound to run out of tears eventually, every last one wrung from her hot eyes, and sliding down into dry gaspings, fists tight and fingernails bent, hair tangled from tossing and turning feverishly.  _Gone gone gone_ ,  she thinks, the word spiraling in her head like the revolutions of a motor.

“I thought you might come back here,” Capable says, voice soft. Of course it is Capable who climbs up behind her, while everyone else gives her a wide berth.

“Where else is there?” Cheedo asks, voice rough with the long stretch of abject misery. The walls are still painted, foolishly, and the phrases scrawled over each one makes her sick to her stomach.  _ Not things _ _,_ indeed. She would be a thing again, if she could turn back time, have those she loves back.

Capable slots herself behind Cheedo, nuzzling at the back of her neck with the tip of her nose. “I had the same thought,” she whispers. “Everyone is celebrating.”

“Celebrating,” Cheedo echoes. The word feels foreign, divorced from its meaning when she feel so hollowed, only a skin and then empty space beneath.

“I know,” Capable says, voice cracking, “I know.” She keeps saying it, over and over like she’s a bowl of sand that just keeps spilling, each repetition a grain of sand and there is so much dust in the waste.

Capable, Cheedo realizes, does. Cheedo hadn’t wanted to sympathize with Capable, because she’d thought it so different, that Cheedo had lost her entire world and Capable had lost only the boy who’d stowed away with them for three days, but it occurs to her that she’s been selfish. The allow Capable her grief does not mean she has to give her own away.

“He’s gone,” Cheedo says, still rasping. Capables arm is around her, tying the two of them together. It makes Cheedo feel some echo of safety, a remnant of when it was still the five of them, lives knotted together in a way that was consistent, a permenant known quantity. She covers Capable’s arm with her own palms.

Capable grips her tightly, pressing her chin to her shoulder. “He would be so happy you are not a thing,” she murmurs. “Happy for you now.”

“He wouldn’t,” she says, convinced of the opposite. Her voice is still wet, “I may have been a thing to him but I was the most precious thing.”

“You were,,” Capable agrees, brushing back Cheedo’s hair from the heated skin of her neck, “he always wanted what is best for you. That was never Joe, being his wife.”

“I would have, wouldn’t have,” Cheedo chokes out, talking in circles, “one day, maybe.”

Capable is warm at her back, “Yes,” she agrees, and Cheedo is grateful, so grateful, when she says, “you would have been retired after a few years with no child to show for it, and he would have kept you from being cast out into the waste. He would have kept you safe, loved you. Cheedo the Fragile. The two of you would have been so soft.”

It is like Capable has taken the script directly from Cheedo’s fantasy, from her most private thoughts, the place she retreats to when she was with Joe, into the future or a place that only exists in the privacy of her mind. Cheedo cries for a while longer, drawing strength from Capable before she comes to the natural conclusion that with Rictus dead, she can no longer be Cheedo the Fragile, not completely. She must also be something else, too. 

Cheedo twists around, spinning in Capable’s grip until they are nose to nose. She loves her fellow wives -- or are they widows, now? -- and she can give back to Capable.

“I am sorry about your war boy,” she says, one hand flat against Capable’s neck. “He should have had more time, and you should have had more tenderness.”

“He should have had more tenderness,” Capable dissents, touching Cheedo’s hair, sweeping it tenderly behind her, prying it away where it has been plastered with sweat to her neck. “I have had plenty.”

They stay curled together, seemingly with no intention of moving any time soon. Cheedo breathes in deeply, trying to match herself to Capable’s steady rhythm.

“Do you think Rictus had someone to witness him?” Cheedo whispers, not sure if Capable is sleeping.

“Of course,” Capable says, without opening her eyes. “As I witnessed Nux. They ride forever, shiny and chrome.”

She knows her grief is not unique, not the rippling nothing inside of her where love or the possibility of it once sat, because Capable will mourn Nux for a long time to come. Neither is she the only one who will grieve Angharad, because Angharad was something else entirely, important to each of them in a different way. She is not even the only one that will mourn Rictus, because his warmth and protection, often stationed as a guard when Joe was off seeing to his war boys or other official matters of the Citadel, was something of a bright spot in their lives: Rictus who named them all when Joe brought them in, stripping them of identity and clothing alike, Rictus who was unable to keep still at the news each time he was to be a brother, to have a sibling.

When he had reacted to the news of Splendid’s latest pregnancy, he had lifted her off the ground in his joy, and for a fleeting moment she’d imagined him instead as he could have been, in another life, luminous with his own prospects of fatherhood.

That is something Cheedo will never have now, because War Rigs can turn around, but time only moves one way down the fury road.

“I love you,” she tells Capable, taking inventory of what she still has, because there are some things, even though right now she feels like a body missing vital pieces, lungs and eyelids. Maybe Furiosa had been forced to count her limbs, once. Furiosa was left with three good ones -- she herself has three sisters left, and a Furiosa, and the many mothers, although they are few now.

“And you, little sister,” Capable says.

They don’t move for a while.

Cheedo blinks too many times and loses a few hours, loses the whole afternoon, walking with her heart pounding and a mouthful of Capable’s soft hair in the dark. She extricates herself and starts moving.

She’d lived in the vault at the center of the city for almost a year before they left with Furiosa, not actually a very long time compared to Toast and Splendid but long enough that it’s strange that she hardly knows anything about the layout of the Citadel. It’s not that they were never allowed out of the vault, but it certainly wasn’t a common occurrance.

It takes some maneuvering, and painstaking retracing when she runs into dead ends, but she eventually finds herself before Furiosa, who is looking out over the Citadel with a scowl, her chin sharp and face bruised.

“Cheedo,” she greets her, without looking away from the horizon.

“I think,” Cheedo says, voice careful, “that if there is anyone willing, or strong enough to go, we should scout out the wreckage.”

Furiosa says nothing, and it is painful for Cheedo to finish, throat feeling like a cave in as she completes the thought: “For the bodies. Angharad’s and -- and her child’s. And the others.”

Furiosa keeps her eyes glued to the horizon. “The war party was very large, and we do not know how much damage a single flipped rig to block the entrance did. We don’t know how many of the war party collided with the rig, and how many were far back enough that they had time to stop, and are simply regrouping.”

Cheedo thinks about that. “So what are you going to do?”

“I’m already--” Furiosa says, but seems to think better of explaining. She reaches out her arm instead, curls her fingers around Cheedo’s elbow. “I’m waiting,” she says, voice tired, but strong, like all of her, “for Max to send up a flare.”

Something swoops through Cheedo, something like hope, that they will find some of their beloved alive, shame that she had to fall apart before she could think of getting to Furiosa to ask her about salvage, or rescue, and then on the heels of that, dread at having what she knows in her heart confirmed, that no one has survived the fury road, and she’s back to starting over as someone she does not yet know how to be.

“Max is… he went back?” It is hard to imagine Max, who’d given his blood to Nux for too long, and then even more to Furiosa, during the scary minutes where she’d been gasping and weak, leaking from her side. He should have been resting, but Cheedo was glad to have him out there.

“Yes. He and some of the remaining war boys. I would have preferred he stayed, but he would not have it.”

“What will happen if he comes across people in the wreckage, alive?”

Cheedo chews on the inside of her cheek while Furiosa answers her, “With the people eater and Immortan Joe gone, they will be without a leader. He will invite them back, with war pups to vouch for his good faith.”

“And what does it mean if he sends up a flare?” Cheedo asks. She does not have the heart to give voice to her secret hope, already spinning out of control, of her Rictus, strong and sure, limping out of the wreckage, of Angharad curled up in his arms, her wight kittenish and insignificant in his arms, maybe even of the little fully grown war pup, Nux, surviving to wring a few more years out of his half life.

“One for damaged survivors,” Furiosa explains. She never takes her eyes off the horizon for a second, her back pulled bowstring taut, “And two for hostile survivors. We set out either way.”

When they were in the war rig, The Dag prayed to anyone that would listen. Cheedo doesn’t like talking if there’s no one on the other end to hear it, but names spill from her lips regardless, quiet, and she supposes that is its own sort of prayer. She stands near enough to Furiosa to share heat and they stare at the night sky together.

Next to Furiosa, Cheedo must look so small. She feels so small, like she doesn’t really exist. They stand shoulder to shoulder, waiting for a flare to break the sky, hardly breathing. 


	2. Rictus

Furiosa is a bow stretched tight, and when the flares streak across the sky, too bright to look at for long, she flies into action.

Cheedo struggles to keep up with her. She flies down hallways, Cheedo taking three steps for every one of Furiosas, heart pounding in her ears. Furiosa must be exhausted, still looks like she’s come out of the shredder, but she must be pulling on some reserve. This is Imperator Furiosa, Cheedo thinks, awed, and it reminds her of the first time she’d seen her, one of Joe’s deadliest weapons.

If Rictus is alive, Cheedo knows, if he is alive and can move under his own power, he will be over the body of Angharad. She is getting her hopes up, she realizes, hating herself for that, knowing it and still not being able to stop.

The rig Nux had overturned had given them enough time to make it to the Citadel first, given Furiosa enough time to stand, only half under her own power and half under the support of Max’s hand at her elbow, long enough to show off the body of Immortan Joe and rally the city to the thought of the end of his reign, but it had hardly been a pile-up that encompassed the whole war party. Everyone in that convoy was adept behind the wheel, or they’d have already been dead, and many of them should have had adequate time to stop, stuck but not crushed.

If she thinks it enough times, maybe she can make it true.

At the garage, Furiosa swings herself into the driver’s seat and Cheedo does not hesitate to scramble in, panting and pressing a hand to her side where something in her muscle is pinched, and Furiosa looks at her for a moment, eyes dark.

“Are you sure,” Furiosa starts.

“Fang it,” Cheedo snarls, and Furiosa throws the beast into motion.

There are others  following, others waiting for her signal, although not many. They weren’t wrong when they’d estimated the Citadel’s population of sick war boys and pups too young to drive, but Furiosa seems to have found at least a few healthy enough to trail behind her.

“Who are they,” Cheedo says, when Furiosa is past the rapid movement of a beginning pursuit, going straight and fast down the fury road.

“Ace,” she says in a tight voice. “And boys loyal to him. He’s the first man I want protecting my shoulder.”

Cheedo has a vague memory of voices she could hear from the hold, and feels surprised. “Did he... ?” she says, and stops because there is no way to say if he’s not dead, how has he forgiven you? Finally, she says, not quite a question, “He trusted you a lot when we left.”

Furiosa’s mouth goes slack for a minute, and Cheedo wonders if she’s surprised her, too, if she hadn’t expected them down there to know what was going on, all of them or Cheedo specifically.

“He trusts me still,” Furiosa says, and Cheedo has no follow-up questions.

*

They find the pile of bodies before they find Max.

Cheedo’s stomach feels slick and churning, but she swallows hard against revulsion, against fear, and follows Furiosa. “Systematic,” Furiosa says to the man who seems to fall into step with her from behind them without seeming to speed up.

The man, in the last of his war paint, seemed to agree. “Waste of energy to drag them out of the wreckage though.”

Furiosa makes an assenting noise, her eyes scanning the line of cars. “Why aren’t there,” she murmurs.

“You’re right,” he says, pointing his chin at the horizon. “Towards Gastown, probably. Or the Bullet Farm, if some war boy’s got ambition.”

Furiosa responds in a low voice, Cheedo doesn’t catch it all, but hears reinforcements? And this must be her Ace, because aside from Joe himself, Cheedo has never seen Furiosa need a second opinion.

“Unlikely,” Ace says, voice carrying better than Furiosa’s, even angled away from her as they are.

“Max,” Cheedo says, spotting him, his upper body inside a low-slung car with a rusted front gril. He turns to her immediately, whipping away from the vehicle like he’s been burned. Max is completely filthy, dust in his hair and blood on his shoulder.

Max nods sheepishly at them, and Cheedo doesn’t need Furiosa to tell her that it isn’t his blood. “Lots of dead near the front,” he says, “near the back, some cars stripped and abandoned, and a lot of track marks headed,” he trails off, gesturing in the directions of both of the townships close enough for reliable travel back and forth.

“Survivors?” Cheedo asks.

Max leads them back a few cars, where he’s apparently dragged a few of the war boys, left them propped up in the shade of one of the pursuit cars. Some of them are unconcious, battered, one has a leg in pieces, and another a shredded chest. They all hurt to look at, and Cheedo doesn’t recognize anyone at first glance. That’s not a good sign; everyone she knows stands out so much except the one little war boy, which she’d wanted Capable to have to keep.

“Still looking,” Max says, and Cheedo knows he is talking to her. She swipes a quick hand across her eyes, too hot and spilling fast. She wipes across them again, getting grit them, unable to keep ahead of the water.

“Any violence?” Furiosa asks, resting the nub of her arm against Cheedo’s shoulder, perhaps the most she can give her at a time like this, when there is still so much to attend to.

“No,” Max says, and then, “a bit.”

Ace says, “Well?” He hasn’t spent the last three days with them. He does not know that it takes Max a long time to say what he is thinking.

“A war boy started in that pile,” he says, pointing over his shoulder with his thumb.

“Ace,” Furiosa says, “will you start moving the boys into your rig?”

“Aye,” he says, and sets off. Furiosa gestures for Cheedo to follow him, to help where she can, which says a lot about how much she trusts Ace, or how much she needs to speak with Max privately right now. Cheedo follows, and does her best with her limited strength to be helpful. Mostly Ace seems to put her in charge of keeping limbs from dangling awkwardly as he carries war boys with smooth steps, strong and sure. After two boys, one unconscious and one mumbling something about his missed opportunity, Valhalla’s doors closed to him now, Ace’s voice low and soothing as he tells him that there will be other chances to die historic, heroic.

Cheedo is so focussed on keeping his legs straight so they don’t strain his hips, and then watching as Ace loads him into the hold of his righ that she almost doesn’t see him arrive, which is incomprehensible because he has a way of taking over the horizon, of dwarfing everything nearby. Ace sticks himself right between her and Rictus, shoulders tense, and she sidesteps him. She gives a squeal, but her voice cracks, surprise turning her throat to rusted aluminum.

He looks exhausted, terrible, his jaw harness broken somewhere, and his jaw hanging precisely how it shouldn’t, but he looks so glad to see her. She moves into his space, reaches up, up to take his jaw and hold it where is should be.

“Rictus,” she says on a sigh, and tears are coming again, bruning on the way down and her throat aching. She says it again, just to be sure.

“Yes,” Rictus agrees, reaching down to grasp her shoulders, pulling her against him. His hold hardly uses all of his strength, and she knows how hard his first impulse is to hug because on occasion she has had to remind him to take it down a few degrees of rigor. His hands find her face, under her eyes, trying to wipe away the water there. She hides her tears by pressing her face against the dusty expanse of his bare chest, and by virtue of it existing, moving with life and warm blood just past the skin, it is the most refreshing thing she has felt.

“Where are you hurt,” he says, sounding panicked. By then, Cheedo’s hand’s have been trapped by Rictus’ hug, and his jaw is hanging low again, and she can hear it when he speaks.

The answer, of course, is: _everywhere_. It is also: _my heart_. Perhaps: _In the empty space my sister should be, like a phantom limb_.

Her Rictus is a man of simple delights and simple sorrows. She does not, here in the waste, in the middle of wreckage they’re still checking survivors for, have time to explain to him the phantom pain of being alive when she perhaps should have gone under the wheels instead.

“Oh, Rictus,” she says, and then the only thing she can say that is just as honest as her sorrow: “I am so glad to see you.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am trash. So maybe, just this once, everybody lives. Come be my pal on [tumblr](http://www.katiewont.tumblr.com) so I can stop cornering my poor mom to rehash the best parts of the MM universe. (Spoiler: they're all the best part, mom, sit back down.)


	3. Angharad

“Are you here for Splendid?” Rictus asks.

“I think,” Cheedo says, swallowing thickly. “We’re here for anyone who survived the crash who wants to come back with us.”

Behind her, she is still aware of the Ace, but he is still.

“And Splendid?” he asks, again.

“And Splendid,” Cheedo says. “Do you know where her… body is?”

“Splendid is sick,” Rictus says, frowning.

Cheedo presses the heel of her hand against his broad, thick pectoral to get far enough to see his face, heart hammering. “What?”

“Splendid is so sick,” he emphasizes. “You should take her home.”

“Boss,” she hears Ace call behind her, sharp. “You’d better get over here.”

By the time Furiosa gets to them, Cheedo is on her own two feet, pressing Rictus for more information, but he can’t articulate beyond _terrible_ and _sick_. Furiosa arrives at full speed on her feet, and Max a few paces behind. He moves to go past her, towards Rictus, but she puts her hand at his elbow, and he stops, even though he looks like he wants to do nothing of the sort.

“She’s fine,” Furiosa says, low. Cheedo wonders how she would describe to Max that Rictus may have been kamikaze loyal to Joe, but that the girls are all safe with him. Always, sure as gravity.

“Boss, Rictus is talking about your girl,” Ace says out of the side of his mouth. Cheedo can see herself in the sharp sunset light on his goggles. She’s a mess, torn cloth and tangled hair. It hadn’t even occurred to her to worry about that until now.

“The baby is dead,” Rictus says in a broken voice.

Cheedo takes his hand in both of hers, and it is enormous compared to them. Her hands look like insects in his palm, fragile.

“I know, Rictus,” Furiosa says in a low voice. “What about Splendid?”

Rictus glares at Max, and back at Furiosa. “He’s feral,” he finally says.

“He saved my life,” Cheedo says, at the same time Furiosa is saying: “He’s under my command.”

Rictus blinks. “I—”

“Max,” Furiosa says. “Please go sit in the rig.”

Max cocks his head, flinching a little, but only for the briefest moment, before moving to obey.

When he’s gone, Rictus says, “Imperator,” inclining his head. His jaw tumbles open again and he reaches up to hold it, snaps it into place with a crunch that makes her shudder.

“Rictus, if Splendid is alive, I need you to tell me where she is so I can get her back to the citadel.”

“You’ve got the blood bag with you,” Rictus says, stubborn, and Furiosa’s face goes hard. “The one that drove the rig.”

Cheedo is still holding onto Rictus. She shakes her head at Furiosa, the action so small, but she knows Furiosa sees her. She’s so aware of everything, even with one swollen eye.

“Splendid crawled out of the rig herself,” she says, “and if she’s alive in this wreckage, you need to show us where she is.”

*

Cheedo was born in the Waste. Cheedo was born and lived hungry and brittle and when an immortan stepped down from the behemoth monster that was his war rig and pulled her forward into her new life as one of Immortan Joe’s things… it’s not really a distasteful memory, not like it was for Splendid, who had a family, or Toast, who was an apprentice in the armory of bullet town and who yearned constantly for the action and danger that she’d left with that life.

And up until they’d left, it hadn’t been terrible for her — she loved Miss Giddy and the other wives. She knew how to read, and she was good at making the piano make pleasant noises, even though there was no one to teach them how. She was always glad to see Rictus, who was with them often, especially if the Organic Mechanic was going to come by, because one of Immortan Joe’s earlier wives tried to claw out Organic’s eye and the next time he’d sent his son to make sure they didn’t fight him.

From the Organic Mechanics perspective, sending Rictus Erectus to protect him from the wives could not have gone worse. Cheedo wasn’t there, of course. By the time Cheedo was a wife, they already trusted him implicitly. To hear Splendid tell it (and she did, sort of often, because it made Rictus go soft and pleased, to have her talking about him, protective beside the door when Joe was off on a ride) the Mechanic had been leering and nasty as he always was when starting an exam, pinching the inside of the wife in question’s thigh, laughing and joking with Rictus, when Rictus had wrapped his hand around the Organic Mechanic’s throat until all levity drained from him, and he had conducted himself with the utmost professionality.

“Be nice,” Rictus had demanded, and it sounded a little silly when Angharad said it, but Cheedo knows how big Rictus is, and nothing he says when he’s angry sounds silly. Sometimes, when Angharad would talk about it, or any situation where Rictus had been around to protect them, Rictus would chime in with his own lines.

By the time Cheedo was the newest wife, he was part of the tour _: here is where we sleep, this is where we learn, when the Immortan visits we have sex with him here, and this is where Rictus sits. If anyone but the Immortan bothers you, he will take care of it._

By the time Cheedo has been in the Citadel a year, she knows that the only quality Rictus has that will damage a wife is the exuberance of his hugs, and he only has to be reminded once to adjust, and that he’s incurably terrible at braiding hair.

*

Rictus takes them to Splendid.

Rictus, who is _alive_ , takes them to Splendid, who doesn’t look good, but who makes a noise that indicates that she is also alive. “I had to tie her up,” Rictus says before he gets to the car he’s apparently left her in.

“What,” Furiosa yelps, yanking the door open. She sounds terrified, but not heated. It had taken Cheedo a long time to realize why Furiosa reacts to Rictus the same way they did.

Angharad, sprawled across the back seat, takes the center of Cheedo’s priorities. She can barely hear him giving a faltering explanation to Furiosa, but she’s seeing it, the straps of Rictus’ jaw holster wrapped around Angharad’s stomach, like a string parcel.

Cheedo is a sandstorm inside.

“Ace,” Furiosa barks, and he moves Cheedo aside, steering her by the shoulders to get to Angharad.

“Don’t —” Furiosa starts to say to Ace, as Rictus starts to growl.

“It’s fine,” Cheedo assures him. “I’m fine.”

Angharad, however, does not look fine. She looks small and bloodied. The sun is going down now, but in the fading light, Cheedo can see enough.

“The Mechanic is dead, boss,” Ace says, but he puts his arms around Angharad’s prone, battered frame, lifting her up.  

“The keeper of the seeds is a much better mechanic,” Furiosa says. “Take the rig we brought and get Angharad back to her.”

The Ace looks at Furiosa. Furiosa looks at Rictus. Cheedo, with one hand wrapped around the Rictus’ littlest finger, stares at Angharad. Angharad makes one small, pitiful noise.

“Go,” Rictus orders, with a dry rasp, and the Ace snaps into action. He’s not as big as Rictus, who makes the wives look like dolls, but he’s still a solid man, able to cradle her in his arms. He is careful with her limbs.  

“Cheedo,” Furiosa says. “Go fetch Max and get back to moving the living war boys. Rictus, you come with me.”

There is no thought in Cheedo’s mind that she will not do whatever Furiosa asks of her. She puts one foot in front of the other. 


End file.
